Do we have a contemporary art thread?

[Shalabi]

I got tickets to The Broad for this weekend

[doublethink0]

you must first let forms, colors, words and tones grow and afterwards explain them

[doublethink0]

Zdzisław Beksiński

[galactagogue]

i'm more interested in tauba's collaborations, tbh. but I do also really appreciate the line of thought that goes through all her work, collabo and otherwise.

[gravey]

love tauba

[LloydChristmas]

I don't know a whole lot about art, but i've been looking at quite a bit of it online recently. These are some of my fave art makers right now.

Adam Lee





Tomory Dodge





Bjorn Copeland




William Mackinnon





Also, I recently picked up this David Shrigley print which i'm super pumped about. Have wanted one of his works for many many years.

[transitive]

hayley eichenbaum (these are all photographs):

These are awesome.

[viachicago]

^
hell yea.

even though you said upfront they were photos i was just like "oh ok, he means photographs of paintings"

[walt whitman]

taught kara walker to my art students last week. that was excruciating!

[galactagogue]

woof yeah im looking forward to TAing soon. Wonder what type of bullshit college kids will bring to the studio.

also been getting into biographies a lot lately. Started this one about Marina Abramovic cus I was a sucker for the doc and hearing her speak about things. it's putting me in an interesting headspace for grad school, which i appreciate. taking some of that edge off.

[walt whitman]

are you talking about When Marina Abramovic Dies? 's pretty good

lately ive been meaning to read

[WeirdJungle]

Best guess for this image: minimal vaporwave

[galactagogue]

are you talking about When Marina Abramovic Dies? 's pretty good

lately ive been meaning to read

yeah the very same ! i've only just started. I will say I wish it did feel slightly more objective, but I'm digging the mythologizing regardless.

[galactagogue]

I'm curious how people feel about Ryan Trecartin's work. I've been looking a bunch of his videos because of a class I'm taking and I can't really place my reaction-- which y'know, in an of itself, is an interesting reaction to have buuuuuuut I'm still digesting.

http://vimeo.com/trecartin/centerjenny

this one is unbelievably long and even though i sometimes hated it, i couldn't seem to pull away..

[cartola]

taught kara walker to my art students last week. that was excruciating!

tell us some good stories!

[galactagogue]

I'm curious how people feel about Ryan Trecartin's work. I've been looking a bunch of his videos because of a class I'm taking and I can't really place my reaction-- which y'know, in an of itself, is an interesting reaction to have buuuuuuut I'm still digesting.

http://vimeo.com/trecartin/centerjenny

this one is unbelievably long and even though i sometimes hated it, i couldn't seem to pull away..

http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-features/magazine/in-the-studio-ryan-trecartin/

i appreciated this part:

TRECARTIN Yeah, they're all generally my age or younger. I'm 32. People born in the '80s, particularly '86 and after, really do have a different way of accessing performance.

there's also this pretty solid interview with him. i appreciate the way he talks about his work. lately ive been thinking about that a lot though, the talking about the work aspect and how important/distracting/irrelevant it is to the artist.


anways, yup. /rant

[manvstrees]

love trecartin's commitment and his world-building
this was an attempt to say something positive about a bad artist that i hate

[galactagogue]

ahahah yeah there's something really detestable about his stuff, but it's so blatant that it feels like that's part of it somehow. to be totally honest, i have nooo idea what the video art world looks like in general, so maybe this stuff has a foundation in the general video art landscape. I've seen maybe one other young video artist, prob early 30s too, and it was similarly disjointed CG stuff but no script or performers so idk how to even begin talking about it.

[tricksforchips]

I'm curious how people feel about Ryan Trecartin's work. I've been looking a bunch of his videos because of a class I'm taking and I can't really place my reaction-- which y'know, in an of itself, is an interesting reaction to have buuuuuuut I'm still digesting.

http://vimeo.com/trecartin/centerjenny

this one is unbelievably long and even though i sometimes hated it, i couldn't seem to pull away..

He has a show on at the MAC that I've been meaning to see. Thanks for reminding me!

[branzino]

If I were more articulate, and more securely jaded in my condemnation of what big "contemporary art" represents and why it is impossible to suspend questions of the social and market roles it performs, it would probably read a lot like this review of the Broad

Guy Debord said that spectacle is capital accumulated to the point that it becomes an image. Fair enough, except that it is too easy, when thinking or writing about spectacle, to forget what capital is. Capital is dead labor. It is the abstract form of a trillion instances of suffering. Contra Debord, it need not become visible at all, and in fact capital is perhaps most destructive where the social relation that it objectifies is most naturalized and unseen – in the everyday violence of class, race, and gender; in the omnipresence of money and commodities, which are violent forms in themselves because they distribute life and death according to an inhuman logic. Contemporary art is the obverse of this invisibility. This is why The Broad is a shrine to class hatred. As a sponge for surplus capital – its function as a hedge or investment – art absorbs human suffering; contemporary art is therefore class hatred in one of its most concentrated forms. Art takes upon itself the guilt of those who caused that suffering and who think that art will discharge it. But it does not.

Sorry/not sorry to be stirring this pot again

I know this post was from months ago but I finally went last week to catch the Cindy Sherman exhibit before it closed. This review perfectly encapsulates my hesitation to check out the museum and my impressions afterwards. Thanks for sharing naturemorte. The Cindy Sherman was nice though.

[gravey]

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[walt whitman]

taught kara walker to my art students last week. that was excruciating!

tell us some good stories!

nothing terribly interesting to report, really. my students seemed nonplussed, even bored by her work. i had done extensive secondary research, had thought a lot about how to deal with students reactions and how to set up "trigger warnings," and prepared a long time how to frame the abject subject matter of her art. in a way i had prepared myself for a bombshell conversation that never took place and so, it felt shocking to me how...banal their nonreaction was. nobody seemed fazed by anything she did. they didn't see the point. we even looked at a silhouette she made (which i agonized over including in the presentation) of a slave girl giving fellatio to a slave owner. the conversation picked up when we moved to "A Subtley." this uptick may have had to do with walker's production process/the historically charged materials of these objects, and the photo-documentations of random patrons posing in front of them. her work forces a real crisis of form/content, but i seemed to lack the proper framing to dramatize this crisis or bring out the political implications tied up in it.

i suppose a small part of myself held out hope that walker's art, and contemporary art in general, still had power to shock, to activate passionate discussion about whatever social or conceptual issues the artwork ostensibly was aimed at. perhaps the classroom's indifference was more of a reflection of my teaching than her practice, which admittedly is quite ambivalent and confused/confusing in itself, and im not sure how I feel about kara walker myself, no matter how many interviews or nuanced articles i read. anyhow now i feel kinda lousy that i was disappointed that a "dramatic" discussion around her art never occurred - perhaps its just as well... maybe her work is about frustrating our desire for reasonable consensus or sophisticated understanding around Big Issues, like race, history, etc.

in the past, i guess the most reactions (and thought provoking conversation) i've gotten about contemporary artists have been looking at folks who self-mutilate as a form of artistic protest (Mike Parr) or use bodies/images of corpses as their artistic medium (artur barrio)

[walt whitman]

controversial opinion: teaching contemporary art history is probably harder than any other art period/topic.

[naturemorte]

I know this post was from months ago but I finally went last week to catch the Cindy Sherman exhibit before it closed. This review perfectly encapsulates my hesitation to check out the museum and my impressions afterwards. Thanks for sharing naturemorte. The Cindy Sherman was nice though.

yeah i also finally went to the broad a week or two ago. i went for a screening but it included admission to the sherman and the regular collection. about sherman, i have little to say...not my favorite, but nothing i begrudge others for responding to. what surprised me about the permanent collection was that i was way more upset by the amount of good work in there than all the pomo blue chip garbage i expected. it's one thing to be inundated with richard prince and jeff koons in a giant monument to superficiality, but another to see how easily they sit next to pieces by glenn ligon or kara walker or joseph beuys. that review touches on this a bit, but any critical charge or thorniness a work may carry is completely neutralized in this space--the broad is maybe the first art museum i've visited which is designed to be impervious to institutional critique, the way the dorms at my college were designed to be riot proof in the late 60s.
the worst was the screening though, which took place in the "oculus hall," a space clearly not designed for moving-image projection they showed a decent 16mm print of matthias müller's "home stories," a classic, and a really lousy digital copy (public domain dvd, i'm guessing) of ida lupino's "the bigamist." the sound was absolutely incomprehensible, the seats would barely be acceptable at a grad student conference, and they had the audacity to charge $12 a head for it. the absence of an acceptable space for projecting moving image work and the deplorable standards of presentation struck me as a very accurate reflection of the priorities of an institution which appears to show nothing but contempt for the qualitative aspects of art and culture.

[jewels]

taught kara walker to my art students last week. that was excruciating!

tell us some good stories!

nothing terribly interesting to report {deleted for space}

it's really difficult to talk about race in a classroom, I know I wouldn't have been (or likely still would not be) the first person to raise my hand and talk about a slave sucking the cock of a slave master. I wasn't there to read the room, but I wouldn't mistake their silence for a lack of interest or shock.

[walt whitman]

Thanks jewels. I just walked into the class thinking "I'm getting fired over this!" (I've had students try to get me fired for teaching stuff like Adrian Tomine's graphic novels) so when the reaction was opaque, I thought I had failed completely.

It's difficult to assess learning and ones own teaching. Luckily the evaluations were fairly positive this time. I'm not sure I'll try teaching Kara Walker again tho

[galactagogue]

it's really difficult to talk about race in a classroom, I know I wouldn't have been (or likely still would not be) the first person to raise my hand and talk about a slave sucking the cock of a slave master. I wasn't there to read the room, but I wouldn't mistake their silence for a lack of interest or shock.

yeah for some reason, when ever i try to bring up a racial element to things, it introduces a weird tension to discussion that's seems made of at least one part disinterest and i'm not sure where the parts originate from.

[vivian darko]

I've had students try to get me fired for teaching stuff like Adrian Tomine's graphic novels

Whoa

[jewels]

Didn't realize you could be fired for being an emo

[funkfunkfunk]

hayley eichenbaum (these are all photographs):

!!! Wow. Love the flat depth of field. They feel like pastiche paintings. I imagine it took a fair bit of planning to get the colours/sky in just the right place and time. Not that the work is especially new in this regard, but I'm loving the irony of photography initially replacing painting as a means of rendering reality, and proceeding to claim painterly licence also.